


Walls

by Likerealpeopledo



Category: The Mindy Project
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-04
Updated: 2014-10-04
Packaged: 2018-02-19 21:33:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2403671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Likerealpeopledo/pseuds/Likerealpeopledo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He bought her a wall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Walls

**Author's Note:**

> Just a tiny little happy beat; quick and easy.

She finds the blue prints hidden deep in the pantry, a place she doesn’t go, because she has a boyfriend that cooks, and cleans, and alphabetizes the groceries.  “Danny, you bought me a wall.” Her voice is moony and amazed.

“I did no such thing.” He’s still sitting, reading his paper, picking at fruit. She’ll never understand how he eats fruit for breakfast and survives. It hardly seems possible. Of course, so much of their lives together hardly seem possible, most of the time, so maybe eating fruit is feasible.

“Well, you definitely bought me the opposite of a wall.” She’s clutching the roll of thin paper, trying to regulate her heart beat and breathing, because this feels like a step. A step that a man who only recently allowed her to store her belongings in a tiny dresser that he purchased expressly for that purpose, would be hard pressed to make without having something in mind. Something bigger than a wall.

“I bought you a door?” His expression doesn’t change, and it is maddening.

“If you don’t stop playing dumb…”

Danny smiles, finally, and a warmth permeates her abdomen. He can disarm her so fully with the curve of his lips. “Okay, I’m having them tear down the wall between my other place and here so that…that we can both live here. Together." His eyes search her face, and he pauses, "Is that okay? I mean, do you want to live here? With me?"

“Like, I can bring all my stuff here?” She blinks at him, still thinking about how adverse Danny is to change, and to stuff, and to any suggestion that he might not be able to completely control a situation. He is also really attached to walls, both figurative and literal. “This is a big…development.”

“Not too much stuff. But yes.” His face toggles between pinched scowl and completely relaxed between the two sentences; apparently in that moment he is becoming aware that living with his girlfriend is something that he wants. Danny sometimes forgets that he isn’t forced to act; she isn’t holding him hostage, he loves her. He only feels like a hostage when they do that role play game and being a sexy hostage is not the same thing. “It is, kind of, a big deal. I know.”

“So I will receive mail here?” She doesn’t want to push, but she also wants to clarify. Just in case the rules have changed.

“Necessary, first class mailings only. No catalogues! Only select magazines. And none with those little postcards that fall out….” When she notices him getting that far off-I'm-going-off-on-a-tangent-look in his eye, she interjects. She doesn't want her morning of sweet discovery to devolve into the end of an episode of _60 Minutes_.

“All right, all right. I get it. You have rules.” She waves him off.

“We have rules.”  Danny corrects, and repeats, "We.  I like it. I’m tired of just being me.” He always tells her that he likes coming home to quiet, but he likes coming home to Mindy in a bundle on his sofa spreading popcorn crumbs on the new rug more. “No popcorn.”

“And always use coasters.” She rolls her eyes but it’s just for show. She can’t let him know how happy his rules make her, it would ruin the mystique. She knows that with Danny, rules are comfort, and the fact that he makes them with her means that she is important.  If he just allowed her to run rough shod through his life, she'd worry that he wasn't truly as all in as he claimed to be. 

“Yes. Always use coasters.” 

“And I still get a present every day. No more gauze.”  He isn't the only one who can make decrees. 

“Those band-aids were adorable. They had unicorns on them!”  It is very hard to take a forty year old man in red magnetic reading glasses seriously to begin with, let alone one making proclamations about mythical creatures.  She is unsure how this ended up being her life.  Her life that she would willingly choose again and again, to boot.

“They were pretty cute.” She agrees, “But I’m not a five year old girl.”

“Shut up, you liked them.”  Danny has a way of telling her to shut up that is oddly gentle, perhaps because he says it at least once a day.  But it never feels like a reprimand anymore.

“I did.” She obliterated her ankle shaving the other day and thanks to her knee high boots, he has no idea she is currently wearing one. He doesn’t need to know everything about her, all the time. “That’s not a good example then. No more binder clips.”

“I can see that. Office supplies are for the office anyway. We’re into house wares now, babe.” Danny's eyebrows dance, and he removes his glasses, pushing his chair back from the table.

She imagines a world of vacuum cleaners and Cuisinarts and whisks and god knows what they’re keeping in the Martha Stewart Collection these days and she shudders. Domesticated Mindy is a persona she doesn’t often try on. She likes Domesticated Danny though. And she loves his sausage and his meatballs (both the euphemism and the real, Italian melt in your mouth…Sweet Jesus, they’re all euphemisms) and hell, she’s in her thirties, it won’t kill her to know the difference between the _liquefy_ and _pulse_ settings on her blender. She is keenly aware of those settings on Danny, and one of them recently made her dissolve into the bedding. (It was pulse, b.t.dubs.)

He peers into her face, “Are you narrating something right now?”

“A little. It was mostly about your sausage.”

“I don’t want to know.” He wraps his hand around her wrist and pulls her into his lap, which is where they both wanted her to be. “I bought you a wall.”


End file.
